I'd also argue it requires a long term focus on personal l&d, strong family and friend bonds, time for reflection, and some time to yourself.
So lets look at a sustainable high performance day: 8 hours sleep 1 hour relax time 1 hour reflection 1 hour exercise 1 hour food prep/eating/housework 1 hour with family/friends 2 hours l&d/side projects
So without taking work into account we are looking at 15hours/day worth of important tasks. That leaves ~9 hours for work including commute time. Surely short term you can sacrifice on a few of these tasks but which ones can you ignore long term and still have a happy, healthy, and productive life?
You can also "optimize" a few of these such as by using your commute to exercise (cycling, walking, etc) or having most of your friendships at work or hiring someone to do the cooking and housework.
I'd also argue that sometimes it is worth it to sacrifice some of the above in the short term if you are getting sufficiently compensated. But id put that compensation at a likely multimillion exit, a million/year salary, Or achieving a lifelong dream.
Trying to double that up leads to problems because working smart takes foresight and planning.
I know in my earlier 20's I didn't have much more to my life than coding. I wasn't as well rounded and did not know that my time away from the keyboard made my work at the keyboard twice as fast.
Maintaining that fine line of efficiency is key -- I've found being married to the right partner who gets the crazy runs, but ensuring it comes back to a norm is in place.
I find I'm able to get done in hours by preparing and thinking a little what can take days of trying haphazardly and burning the candle at both ends, but everyone's mileage may vary.
It is, however, very good advice. The truth is that it's relatively easy to exchange your time for money, what's very difficult is to set up a system which makes money without taking up all your time.
I would say it's far more worthwhile to learn how to do that, even when the numbers (ie. actual money being made) are small, because it creates the freedom to experiment with other, more ambitious projects.
Also, if you're in the habit of "working hard" you may not realise that you're wasting your (finite) time and (finite) energy on something that has little chance of succeeding.
I liken "work smart not hard" to not buying the biggest house you can possibly buy based on how much you can borrow. If you are constantly "mortgaged to the hilt" in terms of your time and energy expenditure you are setting yourself up to make bad decisions and miss opportunities when something that is genuinely worth all that time and effort comes along.
You should never run any system at "full capacity" for very long.
You could do things manually and inefficiently, i.e. the "harder" way, or you could do it "smarter" and save hours of your time to work on other tasks, thus accomplishing more in the same amount of time or less.
(1) You need to be good enough at something to recognize smarter. You need to do the work. For most non-trivial efforts, this means harder.
(2) Smarter is a process, not a destination. Once you have leveled up to be able to work smarter, not harder you probably need to work harder at something deeper to keep growing.
Agree. Let's take it one step further.
Let's say you want to win the game. And one of the ways you do so is to convince the other players of the game (and business is a game btw) to not work as hard. [1]
I see this quite a bit with this meme. People telling other people that they don't have to work hard.
[1] This is really the reverse of the mindgame that the US military plays with all those really cool documentaries about US Military force. They do that to make our capabilities look so totally overwhelming at the risk of disclosing something that we might not want the enemy to know that we have. The weight the pros and cons and disclose what they need to to achieve the goal.
It's not about convincing others to work less, but it is bringing to light the problem of people and businesses correlating raw hours to productivity. Working harder does not mean you are getting more done. Hard work is a given and it is required for entrepreneurs especially, but it shouldn't be harder than it has to be for no reason. Simply working more hours for the sake of bragging rights is going to cause you to fail miserably.
I find it hard to believe that people are working more hours for bragging rights. (Because it doesn't seem to make sense that for whatever you get in return for those hours is more or less the good feeling from thinking that others think you are so great for doing so, right?)
Otoh I definitely do believe that people brag about something that they do for another reason.
Now if you told me someone went to the flower store to get their spouse flowers so they could then brag that they got flowers I would believe that. Because that doesn't take that much effort so the payoff in your mind would be pretty good for the time spent. Make sense?
I've experienced it, that's why I wrote it.
What do you mean exactly by "long term sustainable value creation"? Examples?
I'm quite partial to big plodding corporate R&D labs as a model for technological development. These efforts are marathons, not 100m dashes.
Maybe it should be work smarter, then harder, then repeat?